


Gravity

by loversandantiheroes



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Light to Moderate Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-30
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-03-11 13:25:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13525212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loversandantiheroes/pseuds/loversandantiheroes
Summary: He's no falling star, he's just another Icarus in love with the sun.  A clean-up of an old prompt fill drabble from Tumblr.





	Gravity

**Author's Note:**

> No concrete timeline for this one, but one could reasonably assume it to factor in sometime between Last Christmas and Sleep No More.

_I need you_ , he says.

It is he best he can do, and it infuriates him.  It’s too simple to convey the complexity of what he feels, the quantity of it.  He is a Time Lord of Gallifrey, he can feel the clockwork turn of the universe a the ratchet click of time spinning through his head, but that is nothing compared to what fills him when he looks at her.  
  
Some part of him understands it, has made sense of it.  Her timeline is so deeply interwoven with his own he couldn’t extricate himself from her if he tried.  Not that he would want to.  His past nearly came apart and Clara, his Clara, his wonderful, impossible girl held him together.  One deliberate step into his timestream and she’d become the linchpin of his existence.     
  
He always needs them, his companions.  The strange currents and eddies of their lives give him direction, purpose, meaning.  Without them he is many things, but he is not and cannot be the Doctor.  But this is different.  To say that he needs her is like saying planets need a sun.  Gravity pulls him to her, spins him into a solid form, keeps him true to course, chases away the dark.  His life spirals around hers.  Without her he would’ve spun off into cold darkness centuries ago.   
  
Her hand touches his arm, those dark eyes searching his.  Things have gone wrong again; they always go wrong for him.  She touches him and it burns, every nerve lights up, every synapse fires.  There is an offer of comfort in her eyes, in the gentleness of her touch, and he craves it.  She is the sun.  She is flame and light and warmth.  His armor collapses and he feels, oh he feels _everything_.   
  
Years before, so very many, he had changed for another.  Shed one face and put on one he thought would please her.  Young and handsome.  A dashing young man for a sweet and tender Rose.  But how wrong it had gone, how badly that had ended, for her and for him.     
  
She’d had her own gravity, too, strong enough to lift and old broken soldier out of the dark and into her light.  But he was a fool, and the light had gone, the pull had ceased and he had tumbled into the dark again.  When at last he found his feet he had promised himself never again, not just to spare the breaking of his hearts, but to spare the universe the wreckage from what he could become in that deep dark.   
  
And now, oh gods help him, here is light, here is heat, here is gravity and direction and he needs her so deeply and desperately.  This wonderful creature who had torn herself apart to hold him together, who had begged for a life that was done and finished.  He could not owe her his life because his life was already hers twice over, and so when he regenerated he strove singularly to shed his disguises.  No more masks, no more lies.  For her he would stop hiding.  He owed her that much at least.

But now there is no defense, no hiding; her light blinds him, her touch burns.  He is a moth in love with a flame, seeking solace in something he fears will burn him to a cinder because he has spent so long in the dark he cannot quite remember how to bear the light.  And yet he cannot bear to be without it.  This more than anything terrifies him.  It is a trick of time that has wound her around him, the constant presence of an inconstant thing.  She has been there from the beginning but one day, he knows, she will be gone, and he fears what he could become when the darkness falls again.  The only constancy ever in the universe is loss; the expanding drift that pulls things further and further apart until it all unravels.  How much time do they still have?  He knows the answer already: not enough.  Eternity would not be enough.  He cannot stop time, he can only ever outrun it.

 _I need you_ , is all he can say.  It’s not enough but it is all he can give, all he dares because the truth of it is a promise he is unfit to give her.  And he is not leaning into her, he is not reaching for her, it is her gravity carrying him to her, Icarus drifting high on thermals towards the sun.  And when his lips brush hers he cannot quite bring himself to care about how it burns, and how far he might fall. 

Love is a promise, and oh, how it burns.


End file.
